Just a Dream
by Cassandra Mulder
Summary: The grief was suffocating her.


**Title: **Just a Dream**  
Author: **Cassandra Mulder  
**Pairing: **Mulder/Scully  
**Word Count: **1536  
**Rating: **PG  
**Summary: **The grief was suffocating her.  
**Disclaimer: **The X-Files, unfortunately, is not mine. It belongs to Chris Carter and 20th Century Fox, and I'm just borrowing these characters because I adore them. Don't sue, it's not worth it. No infringement is intended.  
**Warnings: **Character death - spoilers for _This is Not Happening_ and _DeadAlive_  
**A/N: **Well, this took forever, but finally here's my first 10_themes post. It's revisiting XF season eight and some darkness Scully went through for the 'depression' theme. I've only been able to write it when I'm depressed, so that should tell you something. I hope you like, and if so, remember that feedback is love.

* * *

_It's like I'm looking from a distance  
Standing in the background  
Everybody's saying he's not coming home now  
This can't be happening to me  
This is just a dream_

The grief was suffocating her. She had become too familiar with it, through too many losses and all the pain and tragedy she saw every day. It lived in the back corner of her mind, sometimes able to be ignored if she focused hard on other things, but it was always there waiting to come back to the forefront. It would break her heart and kick her in the gut, and there wasn't a damn thing she could do about it.

Not now. Especially not now.

She had cried almost every waking minute since they had found him out in the woods. Sometimes they were merely silent tears streaming down her face as she lay on her couch wrapped in a blanket. Sometimes they were accompanied by such deep, heaving sobs that her chest ached as soon as she could slightly pull herself together. The strain of the last several months and the knowledge she would never see him again made her feel like her insides were imploding, that if she hadn't had another life to consider at this very moment in time, she would have gladly curled up beside him and given up. It wasn't what he would have wanted, but screw what anybody else wanted. She was tired and she was ripped apart and nothing seemed worth it anymore. How could it be, without him?

She hated herself for the constant tears and the puffy eyes, and the violent cries that she tried to bury in her pillow at night when everyone finally left her alone and the darkness and the loss were so deep that she thought she might never get out.

She forced herself to eat, but only enough to make sure the baby was nourished. She could never forgive herself if something happened to it, too. The life growing inside of her was all she had left of him; all that she would ever have.

Planning the funeral was a nightmare of which she wanted no part. Skinner bore the brunt of it, and her mother volunteered to help when it got to be too much.

He had been the last of his family, and she was surprised that her mother took charge of the little things especially since she, while having a certain fondness for him, had privately blamed him for things that had gone wrong in her daughter's life.

She had always defended him, making the case that she had always willingly followed him. He couldn't make her do anything she didn't want to, and she did it all because she believed in him, in his work. When no one else would, when she couldn't even admit it to herself or to him, she believed.

The last eight years of her life had been nothing like she had ever planned or imagined they would be. She had seen things, done things, lost things that she had never dreamed she would, but somehow… She could not explain it in any way that would sound sane or make sense to anyone but herself, but being with him made it all worth it. Somewhere along the way they had become inextricably bound together, and no matter how hard they would try, they could not get away. Working without him was impossible, living without him was impossible, breathing without him was becoming more impossible by the second.

In the months since he had gone missing, she had lived on the hope that they would find him; that against the odds he would be all right. That hope and her baby were all that kept her getting up every morning and going to work, and doing whatever she could to ensure they would all be together one day.

They had taken that from her. They had taken him, and whoever "they" were, she could only vow to find each and every one of them and make them understand how she felt. She wanted them to feel the pain that she felt, the grief that ate at her every second of every day until she felt like she was being strangled by it. She wanted to take everything that was good from their lives so they could feel the hole they had left in hers.

If revenge was all she could grasp onto to help her survive, then she would hold on for dear life, whether or not she ever got to actually exact it upon them. If it kept her mind off the pain for only a few minutes out of a day, she would focus on it until she thought she could breathe again without wanting to collapse.

It snowed in North Carolina the day of his funeral. She woke up in her motel room to a thick, white blanket outside the window. Everything looked so peaceful, in total contradiction to the way she felt.

She somehow managed to shower and dress and put her makeup on, even though when she was ready she couldn't really recall how she had gotten that way. She was going through the motions, trying to be stronger than she had been for the past week; more like the FBI agent everyone knew. But he would know better. He had seen every one of her vulnerabilities, her pain, her emotions. He knew her like no one else in the world knew her or would ever know her.

It was freezing at the cemetery, and despite the fact that it was almost noon, no sun had broken through the heavy clouds to warm her. She could feel her insides go as numb as the exposed skin on the outside had become, and she clutched her handkerchief tightly against her stomach, trying to draw strength from her mother standing just behind her. She had been through this, she was the only person present who knew what it was like and the only one likely to get her through this at all.

She didn't break - refused to - when they handed her the folded up flag that had draped his coffin. But after, when it was only her and Skinner standing there as they lowered him into the cold, hard ground, the tears came again. She reached down and scooped up a handful of earth, sprinkling it over her past and what was supposed to have been her future. Then she buried her face in Skinner's overcoat, thankful for something solid to lean on, but wishing she was anywhere, anywhere in the world or under any other circumstances, but here.

There was a brief gathering for a lunch she never touched in a conference room at the hotel. Byers, Langley, and maybe especially Frohike were all long faces as they said their goodbyes and told her they would see her in D.C. again soon.

Her mother drove her back to Virginia and insisted on spending the night. At two a.m., she woke up from a fitful sleep, nearly wailing into her pillows. Her mother came and laid down beside her, holding onto her baby girl until she was calm again.

Long after her mother was asleep, she wondered how she was going to live knowing that he was gone; that she would never see his face or hear his voice or feel his touch again. How could she live without someone who had ultimately become a piece of herself? How could anyone have been cruel enough to make her try?

They had been spared, countless times for so many years that she never dreamed this could happen. They had tried to take them away from each other before and each time they had failed. This was the one time she couldn't rescue him, the ultimate failure, the final separation.

She lasted an entire week of her leave of absence before she decided she had to go back to work. He would have understood, she knew. The last thing he would have wanted her to do was sit on the couch, staring blankly into the abyss of daytime television, slowly going crazy as her well-meaning mother hovered over her like she was going to shatter any moment. How could she shatter anymore than she already had? It was pull herself together or die, and death was not an option; not for herself or anyone else she knew.

She put on her best dark suit the next morning, hoping it would hide her slowly growing figure, and tried not to think of the looks everyone in the FBI building would give her, or how Dogget would react when she walked in the door.

This was her life, and she was going to do her work, the work he left behind. She would get answers if it took her the rest of her life, and she would guard the still-secret life inside of her even more fiercely than she had ever protected her own.

She felt the flutter inside her lower abdomen, and she knew what she had to do. The truth was still out there, and she would find it, no matter what.

Fin


End file.
